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Unit 2: A Free Man’s Worship by Bertrand Russell

language would allow for the description of such combinations using logical connectives such Notes
as “and” and “or.” In addition to atomic and molecular facts, Russell also held that general
facts (facts about “all” of something) were needed to complete the picture of the world. Famously,
he vacillated on whether negative facts were also required.
The reason Russell believes that many ordinarily accepted statements may be open to doubt
is that they appear to refer to entities that are known only inferentially. Thus, underlying
Russell’s various projects was not only Russell’s use of logical analysis, but also his long-
standing aim of discovering whether, and to what extent, knowledge is possible. “There is one
great question,” he writes in 1911. “Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and
how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions” (quoted in
Slater 1994, 67).
Motivating this question was the traditional problem of the external world. If our knowledge
of the external world comes through inference to the best explanation, and if such inferences
are always fallible, what guarantee do we have that our beliefs are reliable? Russell’s response
was partly metaphysical and partly epistemological. On the metaphysical side, Russell developed
his famous theory of logical atomism, in which the world is said to consist of a complex of
logical atoms (such as “little patches of colour”) and their properties. Together these atoms
and their properties form the atomic facts which, in turn, are combined to form logically
complex objects. What we normally take to be inferred entities (for example, enduring physical
objects) are then understood to be logical constructions formed from the immediately given
entities of sensation, viz., “sensibilia.”
On the epistemological side, Russell argued that it was also important to show that each
questionable entity may be reduced to, or defined in terms of, another entity (or class of
entities) whose existence is more certain. For example, on this view, an ordinary physical
object that normally might be believed to be known only through inference may be defined
instead as a certain series of appearances, connected with each other by continuity and by
certain causal laws. ... More generally, a ‘thing’ will be defined as a certain series of aspects,
namely those which would commonly be said to be of the thing. To say that a certain aspect
is an aspect of a certain thing will merely mean that it is one of those which, taken serially,
are the thing.
The reason we are able to do this is that our world is not wholly a matter of inference. There
are things that we know without asking the opinion of men of science. If you are too hot or
too cold, you can be perfectly aware of this fact without asking the physicist what heat and
cold consist of. … We may give the name ‘data’ to all the things of which we are aware
without inference (1959, 23).

We can then use these data (or sensibilia or sense data) with which we are directly acquainted
to construct the relevant objects of knowledge. Similarly, numbers may be reduced to collections
of classes, points and instants may be reduced to ordered classes of volumes and events, and
classes themselves may be reduced to propositional functions.
It is with these kinds of examples in mind that Russell suggests that we adopt what he calls
“the supreme maxim in scientific philosophizing”, namely the principle that “Whenever possible,
logical constructions”, or as he also sometimes puts it, logical fictions, “are to be substituted
for inferred entities” (1914c, 155; cf. 1914a, 107, and 1924, 326). Anything that resists construction
in this sense may be said to be an ontological atom. Such objects are atomic, both in the sense
that they fail to be composed of individual, substantial parts, and in the sense that they exist
independently of one another. Their corresponding propositions are also atomic, both in the
sense that they contain no other propositions as parts, and in the sense that the members of
any pair of true atomic propositions will be logically independent of one another. It turns out

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